A large and increasing portion of the information handled in today's modern office environment is digital. Many organizations, institutions and establishments store, handle and manipulate most of their information, and/or information associated with their activities, in digital forms. In many cases, such information may include confidential, secret or otherwise sensitive information, which, in the wrong hands, may cause serious damage to the owner or keeper of the information and/or to those associated with the owner and/or keeper of the information.
In many cases, sensitive information may be stored on external storage devices. Modern external storage devices such as external hard disks may contain hundreds of gigabyte or even terabytes of information and may frequently be used as additional storage for mobile computers like laptops with limited internal hard disk size. External storage devices may further be used to transfer large amounts of data between cooperating companies, from manufacturer to customers and/or between branches of the same organization. Typically, sensitive information stored on such devices may be encrypted. One approach is to create a virtual volume on a partition of the storage device and encrypt information stored in such virtual volume. Some of the benefits of the virtual volume approach may be an enforcement of encryption of information upon storing, as well as upon retrieval of information. Another benefit may be alleviating the burden of installing drivers and/or utilities that may be required if/when other methods such as full disk encryption or file based encryption are used.
The problem is that if a virtual volume is to occupy all available storage space on a storage device, content already stored on the device must first be stored elsewhere. As described above, the volume already stored on such device may be too large to be readily copied to an alternative storage device and in many cases, a secondary storage device with the required storage capacity may not be available. Another problem may arise if/when the information stored on the storage device is confidential or otherwise sensitive, in such case copying, namely, duplicating such information to a secondary device may increase the security risk associated with such information. As will be shown, embodiments of the invention may solve the problems described above.